The End of Evangelion Review

The 1995 series runs out of money and time and ends inside Shinji's head. Two years later Hideaki Anno returns with the version he could not make, and the result is both a literal conclusion and a reply to the audience that spent those two years telling him what it wanted. Nothing here is built to please. The JSSDF assault on NERV is a massacre staged with the flat procedural detail of a war film.

Asuka's fight is the finest sustained action sequence Gainax ever animates and it is taken away almost immediately. Instrumentality arrives as imagery rather than explanation, and the film closes on a beach with two people and a line that refuses to resolve anything. The craft is extraordinary. Production I.G joins Gainax and the drawing holds at feature quality through sequences most studios would cut, with layouts that sit on empty corridors and a sound mix that uses silence as a weapon.

Shiro Sagisu's score swings from choral grandeur to a cheerful pop song laid over an atrocity. This is not a film to recommend casually. It is cruel to its characters, it argues with its own audience inside the frame, and it demands the full series first. It is also the most honest ending any anime has been handed, and the reason Evangelion still sets the terms nearly thirty years on.